Casey Seiler: Trump's pulsing broodsac

Published 3:30 pm, Saturday, September 12, 2015

Joan Didion called it "category confusion."

Writing in 1997 about the first wave of Ronald Reagan biographers, Didion made the case that the while some (Lou Cannon, Edmund Morris) seemed to become almost unwound by the man's apparent paradoxes, Reagan's more ax-grinding chroniclers (including Dinesh D'Souza, Peggy Noonan and other former members of his administration) simply papered them over in order to craft a seamless narrative about the president's seemingly spooky leadership abilities.

Didion, however, suggested that Reagan's life made significantly more sense when viewed from a different professional angle.

"Defined as 'president,' or even as 'governor,' Reagan did indeed appear to have some flat sides, some missing pieces," she wrote. "Defined as 'actor,' however, he was from the beginning to the end of his public life entirely consistent, a knowable and in fact quite predictable quantity."

I revisited this essay, from Didion's top-notch 2001 collection "Political Fictions," following the most recent controversy prompted by something ugly scuttling out of the hole beneath Donald Trump's nose.

This one involved Trump's off-the-cuff commentary — a redundant adjective in this case — as he and a Rolling Stone reporter watched a TV appearance by Carly Fiorina. "Look at that face!" Trump said. "Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president."

The response to the Rolling Stone article followed a path now worn to hammered powder by Trump's earlier comments — about Mexicans, Sen. John McCain, Megyn Kelly's wherever, Jeb Bush's use of Spanish and [note to copy desk: please insert here references to whatever Trump-comment scandals erupt in the 20 hours between the time I file this and print deadline]: Rather than apologize, the Republican front-runner booked a handful of new TV appearances and charged that only an idiot or a Trump-hater would harp on the plain English meaning of his words.

"I'm not talking about looks, I'm talking about persona," Trump told a skeptical Chris Cuomo at CNN on Thursday.

This defense was not chased by tough follow-up questions — such as whether the definitions of the verb "look," the preposition "at," the definite article "that" and the noun "face" were as slippery as Trump was suggesting. Or the difference between appearance and character. Or even where the 1966 film "Persona" fits in the oeuvre of the masterful Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman.

Trump repeated his "persona" line to Fox News host Greta Van Susteren, who seemed even more dubious. Van Susteren, who has spoken openly of her own cosmetic surgery, called the remark "low-rent" — a mild jab to the general public, but one that no doubt lands hard on a guy with Trump's real estate portfolio.

"Many of those comments are made as an entertainer," Trump said in his best approximation of a soothing tone, "because I did 'The Apprentice' — it was one of the top shows on television; I decided not to do it again because I wanted to run for president. ... And as everybody said, as an entertainer (it's) a much different ballgame."

Or at least it used to be.

Trump didn't specify what other comments he was referring to. From here on out, he can explain away any previous obnoxious utterance as something he said in "entertainer" mode as opposed to his more recent "politician" setting.

In truth, Trump only has one setting, and its viability is best measured in the brand-awareness metric known as the Q Score.

Unlike politicians, entertainers are not subject to policy analysis, which is why his candidacy has tied most of the Republican punditocracy in the same sort of knots that bollixed up Reagan's biographers. George Will's recent columns on Trump, for example, aim to bring the candidate down by demonstrating that his statements are rarely sensible or true.

This is, of course, a sucker's game.

It's highly unlikely that Trump's campaign will die from any of the more traditional terminal political diseases — not by self-inflicted gaffes (see above), not by staff failure (there's only one persona at work here), not from blows inflicted by his rival contenders (who are poleaxed by the fear of offending Trump's base), and surely not by money starvation.

Instead, it will crumble for the same reason I stopped watching "The Apprentice" after the first two seasons: because one grows weary of the grinding monotony and Trumpcentricity of every single episode. And "The Apprentice," mind you, ran on only one network.

It will be months before we can say for sure whether Trump is running a campaign or a highly evolved multiplatform viral reality show — an organism that survives by infecting cable news channels as surely as the flatworm called the green-banded broodsac takes over the existence of snails dumb enough to eat its larva.

As the broodsac grows, the flatworm pokes out of the snail's eyestalks and pulses in a hypnotic and very entertaining fashion in an effort to attract birds, its preferred host.